1 Yet his pretensions to originality have not been wholly

unquestioned. Dante, it has been supposed, was more

immediately influenced in his choice of a subject by the

"Vision" of Alberico, written in barbarous Latin prose

about the beginning of the twelfth century. The incident

which is said to have given birth to this composition is not

a little marvellous. Alberico, the son of noble parents, and

bom at a castle in the neighbourhood of Alvito, in the

diocese of Sora, in the year 11ot, or soon after, when he had

completed his ninth year, was seized with a violent fit of

illness, which deprived him of his senses for the space of

nine days. During the continuance of this trance he had a

vision, in which he seemed to himself to be carried away by

a dove, and conducted by St. Peter, in company with two

angels, through Purgatory and Hell, to survey the tor

ments of sinners, the saint giving him information, as they

proceeded, respecting what he saw; after which they were

transported together through the seven heavens, and taken

up into Paradise to behold the glory of the blessed. As

soon as he came to himselfagain, he was permitted to make

profession of a religious life in the monastery of Monte

Casino. As the account he gave of his vision was strangely

altered in the reports that went abroad of it, Girardo, the

abbot, employed one of the monks to take down a relation

ofit, dictated bythe mouth of Alberico himself. Senioretto,

who was chosen abbot in 1127, not contented with this narra

tive, although it seemed to have every chance of being

authentic, ordered Alberico to revise and correct it, which

he accordingly did, with the assistance of Pietro Diacono,

who was his associate in the monastery, and a few years

younger than himself; and whose testimony to his extreme

and perpetual self-mortification, and to a certain abstracted

ness of demeanour, which showed him to converse with

other thoughts than those of this life, is still on record.

The time of Alberico's death is not known; but it is con

jectured that he reached to a good old age. His “ Vision,"

with a preface by the first editor, Guido, and preceded by a

letter from Alberico himself, is preserved in a MS. num

bered 257, in the archives of the monastery, which contains

the works of Pietro Diacono, and which was written

between the years 1159 and tt8r. The probability of our

poet's having been indebted to it was first remarked either

by Giovanni Bottari in a letter inserted in the “ Dcca di

Simboli," and printed at Rome in 1753; or, as F. Can

cellieri conjectures, in the preceding year by Alessio

Simmaco Mazzocchi. In 18.1 extracts from Alberico's

“ Vision " were laid before the public in a quarto pamphlet,

hobummur$ VIRGILity wrecked homes

attributed the origin of Dante's poem to that “favourite

apologue, the ‘Somnium Scipionis' of Cicero, which, in

Chaucer's words, treats

‘ Of heaven and hell

And yearth and souls that therein dwell.'

Assembly q/Faults."

It is likely that a little research might discover mtny other

sources from which his invention might, with an equal

appearance oftruth, be derived. The method of conveying

instruction or entertainment under the form of a vision, in

which the living should be made to converse with the dead,

was so obvious, that it would be, perhaps, difficult to men

tion any country in which it had not been employed. It is

the scale of magnificence on which this conception was

framed, and the wonderful development of it in all its parts,

that may justly entitle our poet to rank among the few

minds to whom the power ofa great creative faculty can be

ascribed.

1 Leonardo Aretino, “ Vita di Dante."